What is it like to be Cinderella in March? These schools know it.

After the win, Cornacchia said his phone was ablaze with text messages from friends, alumni and members of the media. His school, a Jesuit university based in Jersey City, N.J., with an enrollment of about 3,000 students and an endowment of less than $40 million, had previously competed in three tournaments and won zero matches.

The team went on to win its next two games before falling to North Carolina in the regional final.

The tournament was good for business. In the eight months leading up to St. Peter’s victory over Kentucky, the university sold about $58,000 worth of merchandise, Cornacchia said. After the unrest and through the end of that month, it sold more than $300,000 worth of merchandise and ran out of stock within days. Annual donor pledges increased from $450,000 to more than $2 million.

In 2006, after George Mason’s improbable attempt to reach the Final Four, a university professor estimated that the school had received more than $600 million in free publicity and that enrollment had increased by 22 percent. For public schools participating in the tournament, a subsequent increase in the number of students from abroad increases tuition revenue.

In the first hours after the win over Kentucky, St. Peter’s was caught flat-footed. Unlike their counterparts at larger schools, who usually do not perform menial tasks, university officials had to personally handle ticket requests for the team’s next game, as well as season ticket orders for the following year.

Brad Hurlbut, the athletic director at Fairleigh Dickinson, whose men’s basketball team defeated top-seeded Purdue last year, described “lugging boxes and vacuuming trash” at his office in Hackensack, N.J., a far cry from the duties of his peers at larger schools. .